Slave Revolts in Antiquity
Page 23
24.
Φύλαρχος δ’ἐν ἕκτη̣ ἱστοριω̑ν καὶ Βυζαντίους φησὶν οὑτω Βιθυνω̑ν δεσπόσαι ὡν Λακεδαιμονίους τω̑ν εἱλωτων (Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 6.271b).
25.
Ibid., 6.263c–d. Compare Talbert, “The Role of Helots”, 30, for a similar view about the abilities of the helots. Sacks, Diodorus Siculus and the First Century, argues that Diodorus’ anti-Roman sentiments as manifested in his accounts of the Sicilian slave wars are his own opinions, and not those of Posidonius, who has normally been posited as his source for these years. This passage tends to confirm that Posidonius does not share Diodorus’ general sympathy for slaves.
26.
Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 6.263f. The Greek word for “lot” is κλη̑ρος. The passage runs: κλαρώτας, φησί, Κρη̑τες καλουσι τοὺν δούλους ἀπὸ του̑ γενομένου περὶ αὐτω̑ν κλήρου. What is worth noting here is that although these are a different phenomenon from, say, Athenian slaves, Ephorus calls them slaves. Plutarch tells us explicitly that Lycurgus had gone to Crete in his journey to investigate good government but makes no remarks about treatment of slaves there (Life of Lycurgus, 4).
27.
Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 6.264a–b.
28.
Ibid., 6.264d–e. This is also from Plato’s Laws, where the roving bands of Italy are also mentioned (Laws, Book 6, 777C).
29.
Isocrates, Panathenaicus, 181. See Vivienne Gray, “Images of Sparta: Writer and Audience in Isocrates’ Panathenaicus”, in The Shadow of Sparta, A. Powell & S. Hodkinson (eds), 223–71 (London: Routledge, 1994) on the nature of the criticism of Sparta in this speech.
30.
Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus, 28.
31.
Plutarch, Comparison of Lycurgus and Numa, 1.5.
32.
Dio Chrysostom, On Slavery and Freedom II, 28.
33.
Thomas Figueira, “The Evolution of the Messenian Identity”, in Sparta: New Perspectives, S. Hodkinson & A. Powell (eds), 211–44 (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 1999). In the third century BCE, Nabis freed thousands of “slaves”: presumably helots. See Paul Cartledge and Antony Spawforth, Hellenistic and Roman Sparta: A Tale of Two Cities (London: Routledge, 1989), 69–70. An overview of the earlier debate on Nabis is comprehensively covered by Oliva, Sparta and her Social Problems, 274–98.
34.
See Aristotle, Politics, 7.7, “proving” that the Greeks are the “natural master race”.
8. Slave revolts in the ancient historiography
1.
Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, 65. Schwartz makes a similar comment about Brazil: “For almost four centuries slavery played such a central role in the historical development of the country that it was virtually impossible to separate any aspect of human experience from it” (Slaves, Peasants and Rebels, 161). Schwartz also discusses issues pertinent to this book:
This tension and contrast between slavery as a pervasive system and the actions of slaves, masters and others in shaping its contours is really an aspect of a long and unresolved debate among historians and sociologists over the roles of human action or “agency” and social, political, and economic structures in explaining society. Did Napoleon make his age or was he the product of his times? (Ibid., 162)
2.
Gad Heuman and James Walvin (eds), The Slavery Reader (London: Routledge, 2003), 545. This is a book primarily concerned with Atlantic slavery.
3.
S. A. Cook, F. E. Adcock and M. Charlesworth (eds), The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 9, 1st edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932); J. A. Crook, A. Lintott and E. Rawson (eds), The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 9, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
4.
Cook, Adcock and Charlesworth (eds), The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 9, 11–16 and 151–7 (both chapters by Hugh Last).
5.
Crook, Lintott and Rawson (eds), The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 9, 25–7 (by Andrew Lintott) refers very obliquely to slave revolts when discussing “The Agrarian Problem”; see, for example: “Hence Gracchus deplored not only the injustice which was being done to those who fought for Rome but the danger of replacing potential warriors with slaves, who could not be used for military service but might on the contrary rebel” (ibid., 54).
6.
Ibid., 215–23 (by Robin Seager); only pages 221–3 are about Spartacus.
7.
Cook, Adcock and Charlesworth (eds), The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 9, 329–32 (by Hugh Last). Aristonicus similarly had a subsection to himself (ibid., 102–7), whereas in the second edition he merits only a paragraph by Andrew Lintott (Crook, Lintott and Rawson [eds], The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 9, 34).
8.
Harriet L. Flower (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
9.
Klaus Bringmann, A History of the Roman Republic, W. J. Smyth (trans.) (Cambridge: Polity, 2007) (first published in German in 2002).
10.
Pierre Piccinin, “Les Italiens dans le Bellum Spartacium, Historia 53 (2004), 173–99, esp. 198.
11.
W. Zeev Rubinsohn, “Was the Bellum Spartacium a Servile Insurrection?”, Rivista di filologia e d’instruzione classica 99 (1971), 290–99. Guarino, Spartakus, sets out to show that the story of Spartacus was just a myth, not based on reality. Guarino accepts nothing from our sources that does not fit his theory so he is able to argue that Spartacus was not a threat (ibid., 79), and not even a slave (ibid., 52); that Spartacus was not his real name (ibid., 78); that Sicily and Italy at this time were independent of each other (ibid., 80); and he concludes that it was not a slave war (ibid., 89).
12.
A further and connected strand to this dismissal of the ancient slave revolts is to argue that the one clear example of revolt, that of the helots, is not a slave revolt: that the helots were not slaves.
13.
Griffith, “Spartacus and the Growth” 69. Griffith starts his article on Spartacus with the observation that, “authoritative works in English, the fruits of a long tradition of rigorous historical criticism, say little about him”. He concludes it, as one might expect, by saying that they are correct in their allocation, or lack of allocation, of space (ibid., 64, 69–70).
14.
As discussed earlier, it is certainly not true that people could not imagine a slave-free society, since this kind of golden age was a topos in Greek and Roman literature.
15.
Mary Beard and Michael Crawford, Rome in the Late Republic, 2nd edn (London: Duckworth, [1985] 1999). This is a usefully clear and concise introduction to this period of history, often used in undergraduate courses.
16.
Appian, Civil Wars, 1.2.
17.
Polybius, The Histories, 1.1.
18.
Ibid., 1.3.
19.
Ibid., 1.5.
20.
Appian, Civil Wars, 1.6.
21.
See, for instance, Plutarch, Life of Julius Caesar, 60. Later, Appian writes something similar: “Thus the Romans, after having government by kings for above sixty Olympiads and a democracy under consuls chosen yearly, for 100 Olympiads, resorted to kingly government again” (Civil Wars, 1.99) and in the next chapter we learn that Sulla had twenty-four axes carried in front of him: the same number as the kings had had (ibid., 1.100).
22.
Ibid., 1.7.
23.
Ibid., 1.9.
24.
Ibid.
25.
Ibid., 1.10. In fact the ancients did enlist slaves in their armies; see Peter Hunt, “Arming Slaves and Helots in Classical Greece”, in Arming Slaves from Classical Times to the Modern Age, C. L. Brown & P. D. Morgan (eds
), 14–39 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998) and Slaves, Warfare and Ideology.
26.
Appian, Civil Wars, 1.18. The murder on the Capitol is the subject of ibid., 1.17.
27.
Ibid., 1.34.
28.
Appian, Mithridatic Wars, 1.39.
29.
Appian, Civil Wars, Book 1, is full of interesting details about the relationships between slave and free. In 1.42, he tells us that the Romans captured Slabiae, Minervium and Salernum and remarks that the prisoners and slaves from these places were taken into the military service. He adds that Sextus Caesar also enrolled the ordinary people and the slaves in the places he captured, although he executed the important Roman citizens there.
30.
Ibid., 1.49.
31.
Ibid., 1.58.
32.
Ibid., 1.60.
33.
Ibid., 2.20–23. Here I wish to stress how Appian saw the situation. For him the involvement of slaves was extremely significant. For a more sophisticated analysis, see Wilfried Nippel, “Policing Rome”, Journal of Roman Studies 74 (1984), 20–29, and Aufruhr und “Polizei” in der Römischen Republik (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1988).
34.
Appian, Civil Wars, 1.65.
35.
Ibid., 1.69.
36.
Ibid., 1.70. Shortly afterwards we read that these slaves who had answered Cinna’s call and were now in his army were particularly bloodthirsty, plundering and killing those they met in the street, “some of them attacking their own masters particularly” (ibid., 1.74). So, showing his true Roman colours, he rounded them up and had them killed, Appian commenting rather unjustly: “Thus did the slaves receive fit punishment for their repeated treachery to their masters”. (They also disobeyed Cinna when he ordered them to stop their violence but they were not then his slaves.) Shortly after this, however, Sulla prepared to return from the east where he was fighting Mithridates, and those on Cinna’s side panicked, Cinna himself being killed by his own men (ibid., 1.78).
37.
Ibid., 1.100.
38.
Ibid., 1.104.
39.
“a Caesare Augusto in saeculum nostrum haud multo minus anni ducenti, quibus inertia Caesarum quasi consenuit atque decoxit, nisi quod sub Traiano principe movit lacertos et praeter spem omnium senectus imperii quasi reddita iuventute reviruit” (Florus, Epitome of Roman History, Preface to Book 1). There is, however, the question of what he means: 200 years from the time of the birth of Augustus, his assumption of the title of Augustus or his death? If he means from the time of Augustus’ birth in 63 BCE then Florus was writing towards the end of the reign of Hadrian (117–28 CE), but if he means from the death of Augustus, then it would be 214 CE (that is, during the reign of Caracalla 211–17 CE) According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, Florus wrote no earlier than Antoninus Pius (138–61 CE), which seems a safe enough statement. Trajan ruled from 98–117 CE.
40.
Florus, Epitome of Roman History, 2.7, 2.8.
41.
“tractatum etiam in senatu, an, quia condidisset imperium, Romulus vocaretur; sed sanctius et reverentius visum est nomen Augusti, ut scilicet iam tum, dum colit terras, ipso nomine et titulo consecraretur” (ibid., 2.34). The work thus starts with the words Populus Romanus and ends with consecraretur, referring to Augustus. The nature of the work is thus very clear.
42.
Ibid., 2.6.
43.
By the time Florus was writing, this was of course the case.
44.
Ibid., 2.7.
45.
Ibid., 2.8.
46.
Hannibal is represented as doing the same. This episode is so well known that it makes its way into Pliny, Natural History, 8.18.
47.
“Et quod sub gladiatore duce oportuit, sine missione pugnatum est. Spartacus ipse in primo agmine fortissime dimicans quasi imperator occisus est” (ibid., 2.8.14). “Missio” is a technical term meaning release from the contest for a wounded gladiator.
48.
Ibid., 2.9.
49.
Ibid., 1.47.
50.
Ibid., 1.47, emphasis added.
51.
“quam eo magnitudinis crescere, ut viribus suis conficeretur” [than to increase to such greatness that they were ruined by their own strength] (ibid., 1.47).
52.
Ibid.
53.
Ibid.
54.
Ibid.
55.
Orosius, History Against the Pagans, 5.24.3. It is interesting to note that T. Rice Holmes, The Roman Republic and the Founder of the Empire: From the Origins to 58 BC, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), 157, seems to have chosen to follow this account most closely in his emphasis on the brutality of the slaves, which is not prominent in the earlier accounts.
56.
Orosius, History Against the Pagans, 5.24.3.
57.
Ibid., 5.24.20.
58.
See, for instance, Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, and Jordan, Tumult and Silence at Second Creek, who quotes from the private correspondence of a white woman in Mississippi: “It [news of the slave conspiracy] is kept very still, not to be in the papers … don’t speak of it only cautiously” (ibid., 26).
59.
Beard and Crawford, Rome in the Late Republic, 85.
60.
Ibid., 10, emphasis added.
61.
Augustine, City of God, 4.5.
62.
Ibid.
63.
Ibid., 4.4.
Bibliography
Primary sources
Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae [The Banqueting Sophists] (also known as The Deipnosophists, which is the title of the Loeb Classical Library translation), purports to give the conversation of a group of philosophers as they dine. In 15 books, translations from the Loeb Classical Library edition, 7 vols, Charles Burton Gulick (trans.) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927–41). The Loeb Classical Library is now publishing a new edition and translation by S. Douglas Olson entitled The Learned Banqueters (2006–).
Appian Roman History, 4 vols, Horace White (trans.), Loeb Classical Library. The Civil Wars are in vols 3 and 4 (1972–9). The most recent edition is Paul Goukowsky, Appien: Histoire romaine (Greek text, French translation, notes), Collection Budé (1997–). A more recent English translation is Appian, The Civil Wars, John Carter (trans. with intro. and notes) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996).
Augustine, City of God, Henry Bettenson (trans.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1972] 1984). Latin text can be found in The City of God Against the Pagans, 7 vols, George E. McCracken et al. (ed. and trans.) in the Loeb Classical Library (1957–72).
Cassius Dio Roman History, 9 vols, Ernest Carey & Herbert B. Foster (trans.), Loeb Classical Library (1914–27). The state of Dio’s text for the episode about Bulla Felix is rather similar to that of Diodorus for the Sicilian slave wars. Indeed, the Excerpts of Constantine Porphyrogenitus are responsible for preserving some of Dio’s text, as they had been for parts of Diodorus. The other epitomizers were Xiphilinos, from the eleventh century and Zonaras in the twelfth. The restored text was edited by U. P. Boissevain, Cassii Dionis Cocceiani Historiarum Romanarum Quae Supersunt (Berlin: Weidmann, 1955).
Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History, in 40 books. Translations come from Diodorus Siculus, 12 volumes, Loeb Classical Library (1933–67). Volume 12 is translated by Francis R. Walton. The Loeb edition indicates which passages have been extracted from the Biblioteca of Photius and which from the Excerpts of Constantine. Passages relevant to the slave wars can also be found with a more up to date translation in Shaw, Spartacus and the Slave Wars, which also contains extracts from the most important primary sources for the two Sicilian slave wars and that of Spartacus.
Eutropius, Breviarium, H. W. Bird (trans. with intro. and c
omm.) (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1993).
Florus, Epitome of Roman History, Edward Seymour Forster (trans.), Loeb Classical Library (1966).
Justin, Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus, J. C. Yardley (trans.) and R. Develin (intro. and notes) (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1994).
Livy History of Rome or ab Urbe Condita Libri, originally 142 books. Many of the 142 books are not extant but there are summaries. One composed in the fourth century CE is known as the Periochae (which is Greek for summaries). Another, the Oxyrhynchus Epitome, was found on a papyrus in Egypt. The Loeb Classical Library edition is a translation in 14 volumes; the last volume translated by A. C. Schlesinger has the summaries of Livy and the text of Julius Obsequens (1959). A recent translation for the summaries is Livy Rome’s Mediterranean Empire Books 41–45 and the Periochae, Jane D. Chaplin (trans.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Many of Plutarch’s Lives can be found translated in the Penguin editions: The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives, Ian Scott-Kilvert (trans.) (1960); The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Ian Scott-Kilvert (trans.) (1973); The Makers of Rome: Nine Lives, Ian Scott-Kilvert (trans.) (1965); and The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives, Rex Warner (trans.) (1972). However for the Comparison, which is still extant for many of the lives, the Loeb Classical Library in 11 volumes is necessary. Volume 3 contains the Lives of Nicias and Crassus, Bernadotte Perrin (trans.) (1916). The full list for the others is:
•
Parallel Lives, I: Theseus and Romulus. Lycurgus and Numa. Solon and Publicola
•
Parallel Lives, II: Themistocles and Camillus. Aristides and Cato Major. Cimon and Lucullus
•
Parallel Lives, III: Pericles and Fabius Maximus. Nicias and Crassus
•
Parallel Lives, IV: Alcibiades and Coriolanus. Lysander and Sulla
•
Parallel Lives, V: Agesilaus and Pompey. Pelopidas and Marcellus
•
Parallel Lives, VI: Dion and Brutus. Timoleon and Aemilius Paulus
•
Parallel Lives, VII: Demosthenes and Cicero. Alexander and Caesar
•
Parallel Lives, VIII: Sertorius and Eumenes. Phocion and Cato the Younger